Will Smith’s straight arm slap of Chris Rock at the Oscars was, for my money, the most interesting event ever to have transpired at any awards show in history. It pips even my previous favourite, which was when Jarvis Cocker ran onstage during the 1996 Brits to reveal his buttocks in protest at Michael Jackson’s
Novak Djokovic’s readiness to walk away from tennis on a point of principle is an act of sporting heroism on a par with Muhammad Ali’s refusal to fight in the Vietnam war. Like Ali was when he said he had ‘no quarrel with them Viet Cong’, Djokovic is widely accepted to be the greatest master
Joe Rogan is wildly popular with men because his podcast most closely approximates the way the majority of us speak, think and interact with one another. By turns funny, clever, stupid, thoughtful and irreverent, there is nothing else like it in the media. This means it needs to be cancelled. If you’re trying to organise
I’m no Westminster insider, but there comes a point when you have to consider that perhaps Carrie Johnson was right about Dominic Cummings. That point for me arrived in May last year when, without giving any indication he might be the one at fault, Cummings unblinkingly described to a parliamentary committee his relationship with his
Like you, I am hugely enjoying the Novak Djokovic drama Down Under. What’s not to like? It is extremely funny. Quite possibly the world’s healthiest man has been deemed a danger to public health in a nation where two thirds of adults are overweight or obese by a government that has, at various points over
How cowardly of the BBC to axe Michael Vaughan from Test Match Special for the winter Ashes series on the basis of two words – ‘you lot’ – he might or might not have said more than twelve years ago. Is this really how the BBC wants to play this? Anyone can make accusations of
Is Michael Vaughan a racist? I hope not. Certainly, referring to Asian cricketers as ‘you lot’, as he is accused of doing – and which he strongly denies saying – would suggest he is. Or, at the very least, that in the past he has been guilty of being egregiously politically incorrect. I’ve met Vaughan
Does Boris Johnson really believe, as he told COP26 a few days ago, we’re at ‘one minute to midnight’ on the man-made climate change doomsday clock, and that ‘if we don’t get serious about climate change today, it will be too late for our children to do so tomorrow’? I ask only because in 2013
Last weekend, the first formal inter-gender mixed martial arts cagefighting contest – post Enlightenment, at least – took place in front of a paying audience in the city of Czestochowa, in Poland. Remarkably, the fight went to a second round. Many well aimed blows were landed by Piotrek Lisowski on his female opponent Ula Siekacz.
Although it’s deeply unfashionable to say so – particularly if you work in the media – I like Boris Johnson tremendously. I’m sure I’m not alone. I like him chiefly because he’s unfailingly funny. Every time I hear him on the radio or see him on the television, he says or does something that brightens
For most little boys of my generation, and several before, the only man who could conceivably have beaten up their father was Superman. Which is why now discovering that Superman is sexually attracted to men is so brilliantly subversive. It’s like discovering Mount Everest is gay. Back in August, DC Comics artist Ethan van Sciver
Towards what seemed like the halfway point of his show in London last night, Dave Chappelle announced to the crowd he was going to tell us something he was refusing to tell the media. He wanted us to know, he said while looking sadly at the floor, that his quarrel was not with the gay or
Something perfect at the death of summer: Emma Raducanu in full flight, smoking winners up the lines and progressing without dropping a set into the last eight of the US Open at the improbable age of 18. The very best, in tennis as in all sports, almost without exception, make it look beautiful – it’s
It was some achievement of England’s, frankly, not winning Euro 2020 given the players we had. As I sat down before kick off and began the customary cursing at the inexplicable omission once again of our best player, Jack Grealish, my wife tried to console me. The fact Gareth Southgate very clearly had no clue which
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Joe Biden is approaching his first 100 days in office. How has he fared, and has he delivered on his promise to bring about a return to normalcy? (1:15) Plus, the proposed European Super League wasn’t super after all. The six English teams invited to join the league pulled out earlier this week, and the
‘So you’re telling me they’re wetting the bed because we’re suggesting the same teams should compete in a competition in which the same teams always compete?’ It’s not hard to see how the owners of the European Super League clubs, the Americans particularly, might be confused by the splenetic reaction of English football fans to
Is it possible meaningfully to oppose the decision by Europe’s biggest football clubs to form an unaccountable, anti-democratic Super League if you voted to Remain? The obvious answer is that it’s not. Not that that will stop anyone. The proposed Super League is an almost exact sporting distillation of the issues that defined the European
He might now be one of the most powerful men in global media, but I find whenever I see a photograph of Nick Clegg, Orwell’s quote about everyone getting the face they deserve by 50 comes to mind. Now 54, the remnants of the boyish idealist are still just about there, but the eyes to
‘Fart for freedom, fart for liberty – and fart proudly’, was how Benjamin Franklin put it shortly after founding the United States. It’s an injunction the cows of the developed world appear to have taken seriously: a strategy for liberation, executed brilliantly you have to say, that seems finally to have brought them to the
There’s something deeply pleasing for fans of cosmic jokes everywhere about the world’s richest man personally taking the time to sell you a pup. Or a pup-related crypto-currency, at least. In between lobbing rockets at the moon, singlehandedly revolutionising the car industry and raising a ten-month old child, Elon Musk has recently been using Twitter
